…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Ways To Convert PDF & Word Documents

This was originally going to be a simple “The Best…” list on ways to easily convert PDF files to Word, and to do the reverse. It started off small when I began, but there has recently been an explosion in sites offering free conversion services, and I just haven’t had time to try them all out, nor put much time to carefully revising this post.

So it’s turned more into a somewhat disjointed “list” of these kinds of services.

I didn’t really understand why I might want to convert a document to a PDF until I read this article listing ten reasons Why To Convert Word To PDF.

One thing that has annoyed me is the difficulty in copying and pasting text from a PDF document I find on the Internet. Sometimes I see a portion of a document, for example, on language learning research that I want to email to someone or incorporate in an something I’m writing (with attribution, of course!), but it won’t allow me to extract a portion of the text.

Web2PDF is an extremely simple way to convert any webpage into a PDF file. PDF Crowd does the same thing.

DocsPal is a new web application that lets you easily convert documents and images from one format to another, including PDF to Word and in the reverse.

Online-ConVert lets you convert lots of different files. It wasn’t working for me very well when I tried it, but others speak highly of it.

docDroid is an interesting take on document conversion. You upload a document in pretty much any format you want (Word, PDF, etc.). Then you email the link to someone, who can then download the document in any format you want. In other words, if you think someone might want to convert your doc, it saves them the extra step of having to go to a different document converter to do so.

PDF Online is another in a long list of tools available to convert files into PDF documents. What makes it stand-out, though, is that David Deubelbeiss says it’s the best he’s found. And David knows his stuff. So if he says it’s the best, that’s good enough for me.

PDFdoc lets you convert your Word document to PDF form and vice versa.

Coverting pdf’s to text is very useful. I didn’t realize there were so many services out there. I’m going to try a few out. I followed your link from over on Twitter. I see your comments from time to time. Thanks for the useful article, Larry What are you teaching this year? I’m teaching CBET in Compton, CA. Small class with really nice ESL students.

Thanks for all your recommendations, on this topic and others. I have also landed here from Twitter.

I’ve been using PDF Creator for a few years, and I’m quite pleased. It does require downloading, but it’s free and does not render documents stamped with the name of the programme. It gets installed like a printer, and is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.

As regards converting PDF to Word (as well as video files with different extensions and Word 2007 to previous versions), Zamzar has worked well for me (and no downloading is required) but when pdf files are protected, it does not “open” them.

Thanks for mentioning PDF online. It probably won’t be available too long but it is a very professional application which does a lot. I especially enjoy how you can convert html or a webpage. Most do so with lots of conversion errors, but this is reliable and also, most importantly, hyperlinks the urls. This is crucial to create a web 2.0 sharable document.

I’ll also add – think about scribd, doxtop, authorstream, docstock as really powerful conversion tools. Most think of them as storage / sharing sites for pdf or ppt or word. However, once you upload there – you can download in differing formats, usually (not always) with great results. A creative use of these services!

I, without a doubt, made good use of the list you’ve provided here Larry! I’ve been working with pdf files for quite a while now, since it wouldn’t be possible sharing them on document sharing sites like scribd and googledocs if it weren’t on that specific file format.

Very nice list, Larry! Good to know that there are other PDF fans out there!
Maybe also have a look at the PDF tools from Smallpdf.
There is a good PDF2JPG converter and a Image to PDF converterr with a nice interface.

Hi guys! Here’s another useful and free software program to make all needed conversions. http://kitpdf.com/ comes with a simple way to use, no need to install it, just upload your files and see the results.

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